West Oakland Sessions | 2022 Creative Music Series
(in partnership with Jazz in the Neighborhood)
Musical Traditions and Jazz In the Neighborhood are proud to continue their partnership and present the West Oakland Sessions featuring 10 creative music concerts by adventurous Bay Area ensembles this winter and spring. The artists explore a range of improvised music traditions, from original jazz compositions to avant-garde explorations, to free jazz. These maverick bandleaders and virtuosic performers continue a long and rich Bay Area tradition in pioneering new approaches to instrumentation, notation, and musical form, by creating ever-evolving soundscapes that connect jazz with contemporary music.
January 30 : Rent Romus’ Life’s Blood Ensemble – February 20 : Porch Materials – Ben Goldberg + Liberty Ellman + Gerald Cleaver – February 27 : Richard Howell and Sudden Changes – March 13 : Karl Evangelista, Larry Ochs, Donald Robinson Trio – March 20 : Facets with Hafez Modirzadeh, Alex Peh, and Keshav Batish – March 27 : KREation Ensemble – April 10 : Positive Knowledge Ijeoma and Oluyemi Thomas, Donald Robinson – April 24 : House of Faern – May 1 : Erika Oba Trio – May 22 : Lisa Mezzacappa
The OAKLANDSIDE January 27, 2022 : New concert series brings cutting-edge jazz to West Oakland by Andrew Gilbert
Please review our Our Covid Policies and consider buying tickets for 4 or more concerts with a discounted series subscription.
Sunday, April 24, 2022, 4pm
House of Faern
Beth Schenck: saxophone – Jenny Scheinman: violin – Matt Wrobel: guitar – John Wood: piano
Beth Schenck is a saxophonist, composer, and educator based in San Francisco. She feels most at home with music that blurs the line between composition and improvisation. Beth’s music has been described by critics as “frank and beautiful” (Greg Burk), “reliably enthralling” and “transporting” (Andrew Gilbert).
- Purchase Tickets ($20) || Tickets for 4 or more concerts with 15% discount
- Please read our Covid Policy
Sunday, May 1, 2022, 4pm
Erika Oba Trio with Dustin Carlson
Erika Oba: piano – Chris Bastian: bass – Jeremy Steinkoler: drums – Dustin Carlson: guitar
Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer, she has written works for big bands, small jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance, and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and is a member of the Montclair Women’s Big Band, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble and has performed with the Hitomi Oba Ensemble, Peter Apfelbaum’s Sparkler, and Jason Levis and Lisa Mezzacappa’s Duo B Experimental Band. In 2021, she was one of the performers in the premiere performance of Meredith Monk’s Indra’s Net.
- Purchase Tickets ($20) || Tickets for 4 or more concerts with 15% discount
- Please read our Covid Policy
Sunday, May 22, 2022, 4pm
First Set : Lisa Mezzacappa Tangle Trio
Sheldon Brown, saxophone/clarinets
Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass
Kjell Nordeson, drums
Second Set : Looney-Mezzacappa-Nordeson
Scott Looney, acoustic and electronically-modified piano
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass
Kjell Nordeson, drums
Mezzacappa, a fixture on the Bay Area music scene for two decades, writes music for groups from duo to large ensembles and plays as a sideperson with Cory Wright, Randy McKean, Nathan Clevenger, David James, Rob Ewing, and others. Her most recent music projects have arisen from deep immersion in texts—from the journals of Victorian lady adventurers to noir fiction to sci-fi comics and stories—and are often through-composed, meticulously arranged suites that foreground the composer’s voice and vision. Tangle Trio is an effort to liberate the ensemble from the tyranny of the bandleader-composer—!—and so Mezzacappa has distilled her compositional ideas for this group down to the barest fragments that the musicians navigate and transform as part of the improvisation.
- Purchase Tickets ($20) || Tickets for 4 or more concerts with 15% discount
- Please read our Covid Policy
Our Covid Policy